Create your ideal state

Chapter 15. War Politics by Other Means

Learning Objectives

· 1Identify and discuss three theories on the causes of war (Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke).

· 2Contrast World Wars I and II with previous wars in history.

· 3Explain how and why war has fundamentally changed since World War II.

· 4Identify the different types of war most relevant in world politics now, and explain one or two in detail.

· 5Expand on the “just war” theory.

· 6Explain the role of ethics and morality in the conduct of modern warfare.

· 7Make a case for or against the relevance of international treaties on rules and limits in war.

War is the central problem of world politics. In the famous words of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” If anarchy is the absence of government and the rule of law, then world politics is an arena where anarchy reigns. Small wonder that state actors are always conscious of war as an ever-present possibility and view peace as a precarious and perilous condition.

When people think of war, they usually have in mind interstate wars—that is, conflicts between two or more nation-states. Civil warsare conflicts within a single country; they have become more common than international wars today. Guerrilla warfare is a low-tech form of fighting usually waged in rural areas by small, lightly armed mobile squads (often fed and sheltered by sympathetic villagers). Guerrillas typically carry out selective acts of violence, primarily against the army, the police, and the government, in an attempt to weaken or topple the ruler(s). Low-intensity conflicts, a fourth category, occur when one state finances, sponsors, or promotes the sporadic or prolonged use of violence in a rival country (by hiring mercenaries or underwriting guerrillas, for example).

In terms of lives lost, property damaged or destroyed, and money drained away, war is undeniably the most destructive and wasteful of all human activities. One recent study of conflict in today’s world found that 13.4% of global GDP ($14.3 trillion) went into fighting wars in 2014, while 180,000 people were killed in various conflicts (compared with 49,000 in 2010). *  Estimates of the war dead in the last century alone fall in the range of 35 million, including 25 million civilians. *  General William Tecumseh Sherman knew firsthand the horror of war. As a military leader, he had, in fact, been a fearsome practitioner of it. In a speech delivered fifteen years after the American Civil War, Sherman declared, “There is many a boy who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is hell.”

But not everyone sees war the way an older and wiser General Sherman did. Some of history’s most illustrious (or infamous) personalities have reveled in the “glory” of war or acknowledged its perverse attractions. In the eighth century BCE, the Greek poet Homer noted that men grow tired of sleep, love, singing, and dancing sooner than they do of war. In his poetry, he celebrated the self-sacrifice and courage war demanded. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing some five hundred years later, listed courage as the first, though not the foremost, human virtue. To Aristotle, courage in battle ennobled human beings because it represented the morally correct response to fear in the face of mortal danger—danger that, in turn, imperiled the political community.

Perhaps no writer in modern times rationalized war better than the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who argued, “If states disagree and their particular wills cannot be harmonized, the matter can only be settled by war.” Hegel argued war